Combating Terrorism Center
| Combating Terrorism Center at West Point | |
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| Established: | 20 February 2003 |
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| Affiliation: | United States Military Academy |
| Chair: | General (Retired) John P. Abizaid |
| Director: | LTC Bryan C. Price, PhD |
| Location: | Lincoln Hall, West Point, NY |
The Combating Terrorism Center is an academic institution at the United States Military Academy (USMA) in West Point, New York that provides education, research and policy analysis in the specialty areas of terrorism, counterterrorism, homeland security and internal conflict. Established with private funding in 2003, it operates under the aegis of the Department of Social Sciences of the USMA.
At the time of the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, West Point's counterterrorism curriculum consisted of a single elective class. In order to fill this gap and provide greater educational resources in terrorism-related issues, the Academy welcomed the creation of the Combating Terrorism Center and included it in its Department of Social Sciences on 20 February 2003. Though thus a part of the United States Military Academy, the CTC was established with private funding and is an independent research group. Primary funding for the founding of the CTC was contributed by Vincent Viola, a 1977 graduate of the United States Military Academy and former chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange; significant initial support was also provided by Ross Perot, George Gilmore Jr. and Major (ret.) George Gilmore Sr. The Center's first Distinguished Chair was General (Retired) Wayne Downing until his death in 2007. General (Retired) John P. Abizaid, the former commander of Central Command, presently holds the Distinguished Chair. The current director, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan C. Price, began his tenure in August 2012.
In addition to providing counterterrorism education, the CTC also regularly publishes a wide range of analyses and reports in its subject-specialty areas. Some of the most significant and large-scale of these research and analysis products are detailed below.
The Militant Ideology Atlas used citation analysis to provide the first systematic mapping of the ideologues most influential in the global jihadi movement. Analyzing the most downloaded jihadi literature from one of al-Qa'ida's online libraries and cataloging more than 11,000 citations from these texts, the Militant Ideology Atlas found that the most influential living jihadi thinkers are not – as is commonly supposed – senior leaders of al-Qa'ida itself, but rather a handful of primarily Saudi and Jordanian clerics; the most widely cited writer is the Palestinian-Jordanian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. The Atlas was published in November 2006.
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